Governments lie, pure and simple. The easiest way to perpetuate a lie is through statistics. Create the measures you want to use to justify what you intended to do from the beginning. I just love the concept of checks and balances. It has a tendency to help slow down fraud and corruption. Show me the checks and balances where the government creates and maintains the statistics (from BLS) and where the congress appropriates payments and increases taxes based on those statistics.
http://www.shadowstats.com/cgi-bin/sgs? is an interesting site. The author has birddogged government statistics for decades. He has also created a primer on understanding government statistics. Somewhere on the site is a PDF file of a report detailing how government has changed how 3 key statistics over the years. Bottom line? All presidents from Eisenhour to this day use statistics, manipulate statistics and know those statistics are suspect.
I spent several years in the econometric business for a food related company. Rule one--The last place you go for economic statistics is anywhere but the government. Here was a company who success or failure was based on 5 year forecast horizon and it refused to use government statistics.
A word to the sufficient is wise.
